What's interesting is the continuing upping of the ante for museum space. The huge spread that was converted into the Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art might have set a new standard for display space, especially for aggressively modern exhibits.
This trend really changes the way scale can be perceived as an element of art. Susan and I had seen Robert Rauschenberg's Two Furlong piece when his travelling retrospective was in Houston, and in its bend-around-corners presentation it was mildly interesting but lacked punch. However, we saw the same show at Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, where it was displayed as a continuous running piece in a huge exhibit room.
The difference was stunning. The Two Furlong piece, seen as it should be shown, was a profound continuum of visual exploration. Huge museums have by definition a huge architectural footprint (and, in the case of the new proposed Guggenheim, skyline profile), which may ultimately be deemed inappropriate for the currently considered New York site, but there is something wonderfully empowering about creating massive interior display spaces.
While there was much I liked about it, I felt a little hung out at the end of it. Another reader had warned me that the last section of the book doesn't have the same feeling as the first two, although all of that may be a mark of the success of the writer in telling the tale he tells and where it would inevitably lead.
I also assume that I now have some insight into day-to-day living in Communist China. Guess what, I'd rather have been a capitalist pig all this time. Pigs are not pleasant to look at, but they sure seem to have a great time in all their wallowing.
I guess any book that has as great an opening sentence as this one has ("Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.") will have a hard time sustaining perfection through the few thousand sentences that remain.
In any event, well worth reading, and once again, I'm not sure if the wistful parting I had from this book is all that bad a thing; I suspect that I'll remember this book for a long time.
Michael Specter has a big piece on GPS, the gist of which is that no matter how cool you think GPS is, you have no idea just how cool it is.
There is a next-gen Internet story from David Denby, and my favorite of the bunch, which is Rodney Rothman's journal of the days he spent in a high-tech net firm where he had walked in, assumed a desk and taken on the mien of an employee, and went unchallenged until his self-timed "retirement."
There are also lots of cartoons, many of which, if you are involved or identified in some way with the Internet or computers, will be finding their way to you from friends over the next few weeks. Enjoy them!
I have been flipping through recipe books for something appropriate, but she informs me that once nabbed, the armadillo will simply be relocated.
I think the front yard would be a nice place for him.
I found something for Susan, we found something for a friend's daughter, and I found a gift that another friend and I will give to someone together. We also ordered a couple of books from the downtown bookstore that we'll get them to wrap before sending them off to their recipients. We'll do the mailing from the downtown package/mail shop.
I can almost stand the holidays when they're on that scale. At one shop, the woman who owns it told us that on Christmas Eve, she'll get a number of desparate men doing last minute shopping.
"They'll buy anything," she joked. "'That leopard-skin toilet paper cover? It's just what she's been wanting!'"
Actually, the leopard-skin toilet paper cover wasn't half bad. For a certain kind of person on your gift list...